This volume summarizes 30 years of fieldwork in Denmark, some of the evidence for the spread of agriculture and the Neolithic into Scandinavia and some opinions about the origins of agriculture. It is intended to be both academic and personal and to describe the actual process of research, because most projects involve elements of both. Each chapter will deal with one of the components of the project – survey, testing and excavations. Eight sites were excavated from the Late Mesolithic and Early Neolithic and these are discussed in this volume. The concluding chapter summarizes research in the area and proffers opinions on a variety of archaeological subjects, with visits to climate change, seasonality and sedentism, hunter-gatherer complexity, aDNA, inequality and the origins and spread of agriculture.

Throughout the millennia and all over the world people have been killed by others, not only in wars and as a result of murders, but also in a ritualised way, often called human sacrifice. Much has been written about this, and research and discussion about ritual killing continue. This book offers contributions to this on-going discussion, by a re-evaluation of the term human sacrifice, arguing that not all forms of ritual killing can be considered to be sacrificial. Experts from different disciplines present new insights into the subject of ritual homicide in various regions of the ancient world. Various aspects of the phenomenon are discussed, such as offering humans to gods, making servants accompany their masters into the hereafter, and ritual killing in connection with execution of criminals and captives. While in some cultures ritual killing was accepted, others would consider it a symptom of barbarism and would use it as a reason or pretext for hostility, war, or genocide. Thus the Romans justified the violence against Carthage partly because of this, early Christians were accused of infanticide, while in turn they accused Jews of the same. The Spanish conquistadores used the argument to justify the genocide on indigenous Americans. The last chapter concerns one of the last surviving forms of ritual killing in recent history: headhunting among the Asmat.

Macedonia is a region that provides its own intriguing questions due to its position on the fringe of the classical Greek world. It is also an area that is of special interest to students of history and archaeology of Roman period Greece, since it was the first to be incorporated in the Roman state. Macedonia shared a similar path of development with Achaea during the imperial period. As provinces far from productive zones and frontiers, both played a minor role in the imperial administrative structure. Beneath this similarity, however, lie many differences: in Macedonia’s proximity to the Balkans, its early contact with Rome, its relatively low level of urbanization, its multicultural context and its sizeable economy, which played their own role in the formation of the urban and rural environments. With a focus on elements of the built environment and human habitat, this book examines old and new archaeological evidence to present a concise overview of the archaeology of the area and develop a better perception of the region in terms of archaeology of the built environment, architecture and architectural influences, urbanization and use of land and resources from the 2nd century BC to the early 4th century AD. Driven by a set of key questions that are addressed through the archaeological evidence, the book explores key issues in understanding the archaeology of the area, like the role of architectural tradition and innovation, the interdependency between practical bases of architecture and socio cultural aspects, the exploitation of local resources, and the role of external influences. Special importance is given to the interaction of Greek, Roman and local cultures and the ways that the formation of the built environment eventually led to the assimilation of ideas from East and West in terms of workmanship, use of materials, design and function.

The Archaeology of Roman Portugal contributes to the wider debate on Roman imperialism and expansionism, by bringing to the fore a much-underrepresented area of the Roman empire, at least in English-language scholarship: its westernmost edge in modern day Portugal. Highlighting the perspective from Roman Portugal contributes to our understanding of the Roman empire, through presenting both an extraordinary landscape in the sense of economic opportunities (ocean resources, marble and metal mining), and also settlement history. The volume presents new data and insights from both archaeology and ancient history, discussing their significance for our understanding of Roman expansion and imperialism. A key goal of the volume is to discuss how the Portuguese panorama compares to other areas of the Iberian peninsula, and to better integrate Portuguese scholarship in the academic debate on the Mediterranean Roman world, and to contextualise it firmly within the wider Iberian and Western Mediterranean. The volume brings together an internationally diverse team of scholars in archaeology and ancient history from Portugal, Spain, Germany, the UK, the US, the Netherlands, Belgium and Italy. It explicitly discusses different national and disciplinary research traditions and historical frameworks in order to assess the potential of integrating best practices in archaeological approaches and methodology.

The first contacts between Greece, the Aegean and India are thought to have occurred at the beginning of the sixth century BC. There is now evidence of much earlier indirect connections, starting in the middle of the third millennium BC, but greatly diminishing after 1800 BC. These were initially between India with its Indus Civilisation (Meluḫḫa) and the Near East and then finally with the societies of the Early and Middle Bronze Age Aegean, with their slowly emerging palace-based economies and complex social structures. These connections point to a form of indirect or what might be called ‘trickle-down’ contact between the Aegean and India through objects, iconography and commodities, such as tin and lapis lazuli, that formed this contact. This book views the Aegean as part of a greater trade network, that includes commodities as well as more recently discovered objects, which accumulated added value as they fi rst built up a distinguished pedigree of ownership in the Near East and Syro-Palestine. It was the natural extension of trade between the Near East and India. In the Early to Late Bronze Ages, India was an important resource for valuable and indispensable commodities destined for the elites and developing technologies of much of the Old World. Finally, the period after the end of the Bronze Age to the time of Alexander the Great is examined and particularly after the sixth century, when Greeks were beginning to know about India. Within 200 years, India would be known to scholar and non-scholar alike, including those who witnessed the Persian invasions of Greece or who later became Macedonian and Greek foot soldiers marching east.

This book is about two islands off the coast of Continental Europe, the seas that surrounded them, and the ways in which they were used over a period of three thousand years. Instead of the usual emphasis on finds in the intertidal zone, it focuses on parts of Britain and Ireland where traces of the prehistoric shoreline survive above sea level. It explores a series of Neolithic and Early Bronze Age sites which were investigated in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and have been largely forgotten. These places were very different from the Iron Age ports and harbours studied in recent years. How can we identify these special sites, and what are the best ways of interpreting them? The book considers the evidence for travel by sea between the settlement of the earliest farmers and the long distance movement of metalwork. It emphasises the distinctive archaeology of a series of coastal locations. Little of the information is familiar and some of the most useful evidence was recorded many years ago. It is supplemented by new studies of these places and the artefacts found there, as well as reconstructions of the prehistoric coastline. The book emphasises the important role of 'enclosed estuaries', which were both sheltered harbours and special places where artefacts were introduced by sea. Other items were made there and exchanged with local communities. It considers the role played by these places in the wider pattern of settlement and their relationship to major monuments. The book describes how the character of coastal sites changed in parallel with developments in maritime technology and trade. The main emphasis is on Neolithic and Early Bronze Ages uses of the seashore, but the archaeology of the Middle and Later Bronze Age provides a source of comparison.

This book concerns textile production at the fringes of north-western Europe – areas in western Norway and the North Atlantic in the expanding, dynamic and transformative period from the early Viking Age into the Middle Ages. Textiles constitute one of the basic needs in human life – to protect and keep the body warm but also to show social status and affiliations. Textiles had a wide spectrum of use areas and qualities, fine and coarse in various contexts, and in the Viking Age not least related to the production of sails – all essential for the development and character of the period. So, what were the tools and textiles like, who made them, who used them and who exposed them? By tracing textile production from the remains of tools and textiles in varied landscapes and settings – Viking Age graves and in-situ workplaces from the whole period – and combining this with textual information, many layers of information are exposed about technology and qualities as well as gender, gender roles, social relations, power and networks. By combining tools, textiles and texts in various settings, this book aims to contextualise dispersed archaeological finds of tools and textiles to uncover patterns across larger areas and in a long-term perspective of half a millennium. Related to the overall societal changes from the early Viking Age raids, colonisation to centralisation to urbanisation in the Middle Ages, the tools and textiles reveal diversity, as well as stability and change.

Why are some things valuable while others are not? How much effort does it take to produce valuable objects? How can one explain the different appraisal of certain things in different temporal horizons and in different cultures? Cultural processes on how value is attached to things, and how value is re-established, are still little understood. The case studies in this volume, originating from anthropology and archaeology, provide innovative and differentiated answers to these questions. However, for all contributions there are some common basic assumptions. One of these concerns the understanding that it is rarely the value of the material itself that matters for high valuation, but rather the appreciation of the (assumed or constructed) origin of certain objects or their connection with certain social structures. A second of these shared insights addresses the ubiquity of phenomena of 'value in things'. There is no society without valued objects. As a rule, valuation is something negotiated or even disputed. Value arises through social action, whereby it is always necessary to ask anew which actors are interested in the value of certain objects (or in their appreciation). This also works the other way round: Who are those actors who question corresponding objective values and why?

The Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük has been world famous since the 1960s when excavations conducted by Mellaart revealed the large size and dense occupation of the settlement, as well as spectacular wall paintings and reliefs in the houses. This volume discusses general themes that have emerged in the analysis and interpretation of the results of excavations undertaken at Çatalhöyük between 2009 and 2017, although many authors also discuss data generated through the whole 25-year period of excavation by the Çatalhöyük Research Project since 1993.This volume scrutinizes Çatalhöyük as the by-product of the activities of a community residing in central Turkey 9,000 years ago, but also as the outcome of the interactions of a community of researchers with wide-ranging theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches. The volume commences with an overview of community engagement practices and of the ways different audiences have interacted with the site through the life of the project. It then considers the differences in approach of the Mellaart and recent excavations and reflects on different methodological perspectives that have been used at the site. It synthesizes the diverse array of environmental resources that would have been used in different times of the year. The ways in which the community at Çatalhöyük was held together, but also how community dynamics may have changed over time, are considered through the analysis of open areas, house architecture and contents, and the sequence of activities in houses. Modeling changes in practices over time shows that the effects of new introductions such as cooking pottery played out over many phases of occupation. The evidence for violence at the site is re-evaluated integrating the analysis of human remains and different forms of artifacts such as projectile points, clay balls and maceheads. The use of pigments on house surfaces, objects and human bodies and the social practices surrounding these practices are considered.The diversity of themes discussed in this volume captures the multifaceted nature of Çatalhöyük.

This volume, with origins in a panel at the 2018 Celtic Conference in Classics, presents creative new approaches to epigraphic material, in an attempt to 'shake up' how we deal with inscriptions. Broad themes include the embodied experience of epigraphy, the unique capacities of epigraphic language as a genre, the visuality of inscriptions and the interplay of inscriptions with literary texts. Although each chapter focuses on specific objects and epigraphic landscapes, ranging from Republican Rome to early modern Scotland, the emphasis here is on using these case studies not as an end in themselves, but as a means of exploring broader methodological and theoretical issues to do with how we use inscriptions as evidence, both for the Greco-Roman world and for other time periods. Drawing on conversations from fields such as archaeology and anthropology, philology, art history, linguistics and history, contributors also seek to push the boundaries of epigraphy as a discipline and to demonstrate the analytical fruits of interdisciplinary approaches to inscribed material. Methodologies such as phenomenology, translingualism, intertextuality and critical fabulation are deployed to offer new perspectives on the social functions of inscriptions as texts and objects and to open up new horizons for the use of inscriptions as evidence for past societies.

Archaeoastronomy and archaeology are two distinct fields of study which examine the cultural aspect of societies, but from different perspectives. Archaeoastronomy seeks to discover how the impact of the skyscape is materialised in culture, by alignments to celestial events or sky-based symbolism; yet by contrast, archaeology's approach examines all aspects of culture, but rarely considers the sky. Despite this omission, archaeology is the dominant discipline while archaeoastronomy is relegated to the sidelines. The reasons for archaeoastronomy’s marginalised status may be found by assessing its history. For such an exploration to be useful, archaeoastronomy cannot just be investigated in a vacuum but must be contextualised by exploring other contemporaneous developments, particularly in archaeology. On the periphery of both, there are various strands of esoteric thought and pseudoscientific theories which paint an alternative view of monumental remains and these also play a part in the background. The discipline of archaeology has had an unbroken lineage from the late 19th-century to the present. On the other hand, archaeoastronomy has not been consistently titled, having adopted various different names such as alignment studies, orientation theory, astro-archaeology, megalithic science, archaeotopography, archaeoastronomy and cultural astronomy: names which depict variants of its methods and theory, sometimes in tandem with those of archaeology and sometimes in opposition. Similarly, its academic status has always been unclear, so to bring it closer to archaeology there was a proposal in 2015 to integrate archaeoastronomy research with that of archaeology and call it skyscape archaeology. This volume examines how all these different variants came about and consider archaeoastronomy's often troubled relationship with archaeology and its appropriation by esotericism, to shed light on its position today.

This book explores the role of material culture in the formation of corporeal aesthetics and beauty ideals in different past societies and thus contributes to the cultural relativization of bodily aesthetics and related gender norms. The volume does not explore beauty for the sake of beauty, but extensively explores how it serves to form and keep gender norms in place. The concept of beauty has been a topic of interest for some time, yet it is only in recent times that archaeologists have begun to approach beauty as a culturally contingent and socially constructed phenomenon. Although archaeologists and ancient historians extensively dealt with gender, they dealt less with it in relation to beauty. The contributions in this volume deal with different intersections of gender and corporeal aesthetics by turning to rich archaeological, textual and iconographic data from ancient Sumer, Aegean Bronze Age, ancient Egypt, ancient Athens, Roman provinces, the Viking world and the Qajar Iran. Beauty thus moves away from a curiosity and surface of the body to an analytic concept for a better understanding of past and present societies.

The metaphor of the palimpsest has been increasingly invoked to conceptualise cities with deep, living pasts. This volume thinks through, and beyond, the logic of the palimpsest, asking whether this fashionable trope slyly forces us to see contradiction where local inhabitants saw (and see) none, to impose distinctions that satisfy our own assumptions about historical periodisation and cultural practice, but which bear little relation to the experience of ancient, medieval or early modern persons. Spanning the period from Constantine’s foundation of a New Rome in the fourth century to the contemporary aftermath of the Lebanese civil war, this book integrates perspectives from scholars typically separated by the disciplinary boundaries of late antique, Islamic, medieval, Byzantine, Ottoman and modern Middle Eastern studies, but whose work is united by their study of a region characterised by resilience rather than rupture. The volume includes an introduction and eighteen contributions from historians, archaeologists and art historians who explore the historical and cultural complexity of eastern Mediterranean cities. The authors highlight the effects of the multiple antiquities imagined and experienced by persons and groups who for generations made these cities home, and also by travellers and other observers who passed through them. The independent case studies are bound together by a shared concern to understand the many ways in which the cities’ pasts live on in their presents.

This newest volume in the Çatalhöyük Research Project Series continues the interpretation of the material obtained during excavation of the site from 2009 to 2017 under the direction of Professor Ian Hodder. Çatalhöyük, a 9,000-year-old tell site in central Turkey, is of international importance due to its large size at an early date, its dense population and its long occupation. Its well-preserved buildings and rich art in the Neolithic East Mound give a unique insight into early village life, and the site allows study of many of the main questions dealing with the formation of settled villages/towns and the early intensification of agriculture. This volume, in 16 chapters by project specialists, focuses on the material artefacts recovered from the site, including a range of clay objects (ceramics, clay balls, tokens, figurines) and others made of stone, shell and textile. The analysis of these items, within a framework of intersecting and transformative “flows” of matter that are entangled with human aims and strategies, illuminates issues of procurement and exchange, house and community (including shifting cooking practices and the early management of cattle), and the organisation of production. Collectively, they reveal how change was generated across 1,100 years of occupation by the ‘productive potential’ of things.

A defining fixture of our contemporary world, video games offer a rich spectrum of engagements with the past. Beyond a source of entertainment, video games are cultural expressions that support and influence social interactions. Games educate, bring enjoyment, and encourage reflection. They are intricate achievements of coding and creative works of art. Histories, ranging from the personal to the global, are reinterpreted and retold for broad audiences in playful, digital experiences. The medium also magnifies our already complicated and confrontational relation with the past, for instance through its overreliance on violent and discriminatory game mechanics. This book continues an interdisciplinary conversation on game development and play, working towards a better understanding of how we represent and experience the past in the present. Return to the Interactive Past offers a new collection of engaging writings by game creators, historians, computer scientists, archaeologists, and others. It shows us the thoughtful processes developers go through when they design games, as well as the complex ways in which players interact with games. Building on the themes explored in the book The Interactive Past (2017), the authors go back to the past to raise new issues. How can you sensitively and evocatively use veterans’ voices to make a video game that is not about combat? How can the development of an old video game be reconstructed on the basis of its code and historic hardware limitations? Could hacking be a way to decolonize games and counter harmful stereotypes? When archaeologists study games, what kinds of maps do they draw for their digital fieldwork? And in which ways could we teach history through playing games and game-making?

Explores the Irish Mesolithic - the period after the end of the last Ice Age when Ireland was home to hunter-gatherer communities, mostly from about 10,000-6,000 years ago. At this time, Ireland was an island world, with striking similarities and differences to its European neighbours - not least in terms of the terrestrial ecology created by its island status. To understand the communities of hunter-gatherers who lived there, it is essential that we consider the connections established between people and the other beings and materials with which they shared the world and through which they grew into it. Understanding the Mesolithic means paying attention to the animals, plants, spirits and things with which hunting and gathering groups formed kinship relationships and in collaboration with which they experienced life. The book closes with a reflection on hunting and gathering in Ireland today. The overriding aim of the book is to provide a point of entry into the lives of the Irish Mesolithic, to show the different ways in which people have lived on this island, and to show how we might narrate those lives.